They moved Harry to the hospital wing at half past ten.
Madam Pomfrey had assessed him on the field with the brisk thoroughness she brought to all her serious cases — the diagnostic spells running in rapid sequence, her expression doing the thing it did when she found things she did not like and was managing that professionally. What she found was enough to move him immediately. The Killing Curse's trace was there, which was not something she had seen before and which she addressed with the specific focused concentration of someone encountering an entirely new clinical problem and applying everything she had to it.
She addressed it. Ron watched her work from the doorway of the hospital wing with the attention he brought to her practice sessions — learning, always learning, the specific quality of a healer in the high-pressure variant of her skill.
Harry was conscious by eleven. Not fully — the specific partial consciousness of someone whose body had been through a great deal and was rationing its resources — but present enough to speak, and what he said in those first thirty minutes, while Dumbledore sat at one side of the bed and Ron sat at the other and Hermione stood at the foot with her notebook, was the full account.
He told it the way he told everything important: directly, without embellishment, with the specific quality of someone who understood that accurate information was more useful than a managed narrative. The graveyard. Pettigrew. The ritual — the bone, the flesh, the blood, the specifics of which Ron had known in the abstract and was now receiving as Harry's direct testimony, which was different. Voldemort rising. The Death Eaters gathering.
He told about the duel.
Two Death Eaters dead — he said it with the quality of someone who had done a thing and was stating it clearly because clarity was what the situation required, not because it was easy. The Priori Incantatem. The golden thread between the wands. His parents' voices, telling him to hold on.
He told about reaching the Cup.
'It was further than I expected,' Harry said. 'From the duel to the Cup. I ran for it and Voldemort was already on his feet — faster than I thought he would be. I had the Cup in my hand and I felt the Portkey activate and then the Killing Curse hit me.'
He paused.
'And then I was somewhere else,' he said. 'Not the graveyard. Not here. Somewhere — white. And my parents were there.'
The hospital wing was very quiet.
'They told me to go back,' he said. 'They said it wasn't time. My mum said — ' He stopped. He looked at the ceiling for a moment. 'She said I had people who needed me. And then I was here.'
Dumbledore, at the bedside, had the expression Ron had seen in Dumbledore's private moments across the year — not the benign mild thing but the older thing, the one that had been watching the world for a hundred and twenty years and had developed, as a consequence, a specific relationship with grief that was neither managed nor unmanaged but had simply been present for long enough to have found its own form.
Ron looked at Harry.
'You killed two Death Eaters,' he said.
'Yes,' Harry said.
'You held the Priori Incantatem connection long enough to get clear.'
'Yes.'
'And you ran for the Cup under an active Killing Curse and got out.'
Harry looked at him. 'When you say it like that it sounds — '
'Like something very few people could have done,' Ron said. 'Yes. That's what it sounds like because that's what it is.'
Harry looked at him for a moment. Something in his expression was still processing — the specific quality of someone who had been through a thing and was not yet fully on the other side of what the thing meant. But underneath that, something else: the beginning of the understanding that he had, in fact, survived it.
'Get some sleep,' Ron said. 'There's more to talk about. Not tonight.'